The group of children who are the same age. How that is organised into classes depends on how many kids there are. There may be several classes in each year, or like my little rural village school where each class had 2 year groups in it.
In the UK state system you normally enter primary school at year 1, go to secondary school for year 7, leave secondary in year 11 (aged 16, or 15 if your birthday is before the start of the new school year in September). This is when you take your General Certificate of Secondary Education exams. You are then supposed to go to Further Education, academics go to study A levels, either at same school, or in my case a Sixth-form college, which hilariously keeps it's name from when year groups were named from the start of secondary (so modern year 7 is old year 1). You may also go to a vocational college teaching everything from hairdressing to car mechanics or book-keeping. You can also do an apprenticeship with day release to said college.
From A levels (year 12 and 13, or 6 and 7!) you can apply for university. You can also continue vocational studies to the same level. This is known as Higher Education. It used to be that Universities were academic and took A level students, and vocational students would go to a Polytechnic college, but they are all called universities now. The vocational colleges also tend to offer HE courses now.
It is a bit of a mess at HE due to a turn of the century push to get more kids to degree level and it is suffering a reset, too many courses, not enough students. Some cynics feel this was more about managing unemployment numbers down, than producing more talent...
One interesting effect is that professions that were often vocational in their entry (some engineering, the non-audit side of accountancy) switched to being degree first. This lead to frustrations as 20 something year old finance grads entered the workforce to find they were 5 years behind their cohort that did an apprenticeship when they were 16, kept up their studies and were already climbing a ladder they had no foot on!
That would make sense if the author specified a specific year's "year group" - e.g. if they had said "I spoke to the 6th year group". But they said they spoke to "THE year group" - which is very confusing to me, even more so after your explanation.
I think he is just trying to say he spoke to 'a' year group. If he said he spoke to a class, would that help? You are right that it is not that specific, a year group maybe one class, multiple classes or part of a class.
In the UK state system you normally enter primary school at year 1, go to secondary school for year 7, leave secondary in year 11 (aged 16, or 15 if your birthday is before the start of the new school year in September). This is when you take your General Certificate of Secondary Education exams. You are then supposed to go to Further Education, academics go to study A levels, either at same school, or in my case a Sixth-form college, which hilariously keeps it's name from when year groups were named from the start of secondary (so modern year 7 is old year 1). You may also go to a vocational college teaching everything from hairdressing to car mechanics or book-keeping. You can also do an apprenticeship with day release to said college.
From A levels (year 12 and 13, or 6 and 7!) you can apply for university. You can also continue vocational studies to the same level. This is known as Higher Education. It used to be that Universities were academic and took A level students, and vocational students would go to a Polytechnic college, but they are all called universities now. The vocational colleges also tend to offer HE courses now.
It is a bit of a mess at HE due to a turn of the century push to get more kids to degree level and it is suffering a reset, too many courses, not enough students. Some cynics feel this was more about managing unemployment numbers down, than producing more talent...
One interesting effect is that professions that were often vocational in their entry (some engineering, the non-audit side of accountancy) switched to being degree first. This lead to frustrations as 20 something year old finance grads entered the workforce to find they were 5 years behind their cohort that did an apprenticeship when they were 16, kept up their studies and were already climbing a ladder they had no foot on!
Bit of a long answer to your question